


Ex Undis

by magicites



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: But Hella's just falling in gay, F/F, Hella's friends are falling apart, Inside the sword
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 03:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17573186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicites/pseuds/magicites
Summary: It starts with an apple and a boat.Really, it starts much before that, with a very different boat and a trial built on farce. With royal blood on Hella Veral’s hands and a (beautiful, patronizing, like a cat after her prey) twisted smirk hovering on the backs of her eyelids.And that damned chuckle of hers.





	Ex Undis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jooniehouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jooniehouse/gifts).



> Hi!!! I hope you enjoy this fic as much as I enjoy Hella/Adelaide!!! I absolutely ADORED the scene in episode 2 of Spring in Hieron with them on the boat so of course I couldn't just let it stay there.
> 
> Also, I know Hadrian's stuff here isn't 100% true to canon, but... I just really like the idea of Hella being the one to try to hold her friends together (and her guiding Hadrian, who always felt like he needed to guide her). I hope that's okay!

It starts with an apple and a boat.

Really, it starts much before that, with a very different boat and a trial built on farce. With royal blood on Hella Veral’s hands and a (beautiful, patronizing, like a cat after her prey) twisted smirk hovering on the backs of her eyelids.

And that damned chuckle of hers.

In Aubade, where time has no meaning and not even the Queen of Death herself has sway without the Sun of Samothes blessing her, it starts with an apple and a boat.

Adelaide Tristé IV saunters off Hella’s boat with a smirk and an elegantly jaunty tip of her ridiculous pirate hat. “Until next time, Hella,” she calls over her shoulder. Her form disappears into the horizon.

Sluggish from the sheer amount of champagne she downed thanks to Adelaide’s magically self-replenishing supply of alcohol, Hella lets her legs give out as she crumples onto a crate. She has nothing to punch that wouldn’t harm the structural integrity of her boat, so she settles for burying her face in her hands and groaning so loudly she scares away a nearby seagull.

An apple rolls along the floorboards and gently comes to a stop against Hella’s boot. She grabs it and lobs it as far as she can, watching as it becomes nothing more than a tiny dot on the horizon.

It doesn’t make her feel any better.

 

*

 

Once Adaire opens _Ducartes,_  Hella spends less time on Aubade’s unfamiliar waters and more time stacking boxes. At first, it’s just another form of exercise; Adaire needs her boxes of various trinkets moved to whatever location Adaire thinks is prettiest, and Hella needs to use her muscles. When more customers begin to trickle into the store, Hella starts finding Adaire tucking wages into her hands after the shop closes.

“I pay my friends for their work,” Adaire explains with a sniff someone more experienced with emotions than Hella would probably call embarrassed. “Use it to work on your boat or something.”

“Thanks,” Hella says, genuinely surprised. The thought of Hella’s boat inevitably brings with it the thought of Adelaide and her infuriating smirk. Hella clenches her fists around the coins and shoves them in her pants pocket. “What?” she asks, scowling at Adaire’s raised eyebrow.

“Oh, nothing,” Adaire says in that awful way of hers. She looks at Hella like she’s a puzzle she’s already figured out.

Suppressing a growl, Hella mutters a, “Bye,” between clenched teeth and storms out. The weather outside is beautiful, just like it always is during this part of low tide. It’d be a good day to go out on the water and maybe fish a little bit, if that didn’t come with the risk of seeing Adelaide. She doesn’t have any more power than Hella does here in the sword, yet she still finds wellsprings of magic that must be reserved specifically for pissing Hella off.

An hour later, Hella finds herself on her boat anyways. She checks every single place on the boat that Adelaide could conceivably squeeze herself into and several that she couldn’t, but finds nothing - and no one - out of the ordinary. Sighing, she unties her boat from the dock and sets off into the waters.

A loaf of bread in one hand and a block of cheese in the other, Hella eats with the gentle rush of the waves against the boat’s hull as her only companion. Her food doesn’t quite hit the spot the way some fresh fruit would at the moment, but Hella doesn’t allow herself to dwell on that thought.

She also doesn’t allow herself to dwell on the possibility that being on this big of a boat by herself doesn’t feel quite right.

She’s fine.

Really.

 

*

 

Adelaide doesn’t always join Hella’s ventures. As the tides change, from low to high then low again, Hella begins to notice a pattern.

On the days when Hella invites someone else for a ride - whether that’s Adaire, an increasingly-scatterbrained Lem, Hadrian with his ever-growing unkempt beard, or even that one time she invited Samothes - Adelaide is nowhere to be found. But every two or three times Hella plans on going out alone, she’ll find Adelaide perched on a crate, fruit in one hand and alcohol in the other.

At first she brings apples. For a while she eats pomegranates, cracking the outer shell with her bare hands and spending the entire ride picking out the seeds one-by-one. Occasionally she’ll bring grapes and throw them into the air to catch in her mouth, in the least-queenly gesture Hella has ever seen.

The alcohol is never hard. Sometimes its champagne, while other times its wine. Whatever it is, Adelaide insists it’ll pair well with the particular fruit she brought along from wherever she magicked it out of.  

Hella will groan and complain and tell Adelaide to leave, and she won’t, because making Hella suffer is her new favorite hobby. Hella will set out anyways, and after watching Adelaide happily sip at whatever alcohol she brought along this time, Hella will demand a glass of her own.

And then they talk, and it’s…

Not bad.

Adelaide never sticks around when they get back to shore. With a tip of whatever ridiculous hat she’s wearing that day or a wink over her shoulder should she not have one, she disappears into the city. Then Hella sits down on the same create Adelaide claimed for herself and groans into her hands.

Time and time and time again.

Until two weeks pass without Hella seeing or hearing from Hadrian, that is. He usually makes the effort to drag himself to Ducartes to buy whatever he needs for the week, but a quick confirmation from Adaire is enough to tell Hella all she needs to know. If he can’t bring himself to go to Ducartes, then there’s no way he’s even made it outside the small cottage on the edge of Aubade Samothes has built for him.

At the end of her shift, Hella rips off the button that counts as her uniform and hurries out. She heads straight for Hadrian’s cottage, noting the large amount of dust settled over the steps leading to the door. She tries to kick it off as she walks, but only succeeds in dirtying her boots.

She raps her knuckles against the door. “Hadrian!” she calls, forcing a lighter note into her voice. The more worried she sounds, the less likely he is to open the door. She closes her eyes and presses her ear to the door, listening for any movement within.

She counts to thirty, each second surrounded by a silence that creeps down her spine. When there's still nothing, she keeps counting. At forty-seven, she tries the door handle and finds it unlocked. The lights are off and a layer of dust has settled over the few pieces of furniture Samothes has dragged in here for Hadrian’s sake.

Hella finds Hadrian in his bedroom, thankfully not laying in bed but definitely having gone without a shower for the past four days, judging by how oily his scraggly beard is.

“Heeeeey, buddy,” Hella says, belatedly realizing she has no idea what to say to him. “How’s it… going?”

“Fine,” Hadrian says, not looking up from whatever he’s holding.

“Are you sure? Haven’t seen you around in a little bit. Wanted to check up on you.”

“Yeah.”

Hella bites back a groan. Where was a monster she could shove a sword into when she needed one? Taking care of people - that’s Hadrian’s thing, or even Throndir, not _Hella’s_. She wouldn’t trust herself to care for a goldfish. She decides instead to throw sensitivity out the window and go with a more direct approach. “Look. Hadrian. When was the last time you showered?”

Hadrian shrugs.

“When was the last time you went outside? Saw the sun?”

“Four years.”

Hella’s mouth snaps shut with an audible click. He’s not wrong. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Hadrian still doesn’t - or maybe won’t, Hella isn’t sure - look at her. By the grace of Samothes, she’s able to get him out of his damned chair and into the shower. She checks on him twice just to make sure he doesn’t drown during the whole thing and cobbles together a dinner with the few things he has that haven’t spoiled yet.

She doesn’t get him to talk about what’s wrong, but that’s a conversation for another day. Ideally, it’s also a conversation for someone who actually knows how to talk about that kind of thing. By the time she leaves, night has already fallen over Aubade.

That doesn’t stop Hella from heading to her boat. What she needs right now is the heaviest alcohol she can find, maybe some good cheese to eat, and an ocean where no one can hear her scream about how her friends are falling apart.

Hella Varal is a fighter. Her life’s work is to destroy, to tear apart the things she doesn’t get. She is not a healer. She does not know how to hold a broken person together, much less how to stitch them back together when the pieces have fallen apart.

She nearly breaks the bottle of the strongest alcohol she could buy in her bare hand when she sees Adelaide sitting in her boat. She’s not dressed in a stupid outfit tonight, instead wearing a simple white dress that glows in the moonlight. She looks ethereal.

Like a spirit, sent to guide the fearful dead to peace.

Hella has never wanted to see her less than she does now.

“I’ve waited here for hours, you know,” Adelaide says with a smirk, popping a grape into her mouth. She leans back and crosses her legs. On any other day the simple movement would leave Hella sputtering and stumbling towards the alcoholic beverage of the day, but all it does today is make her angrier.

“That’s wonderful. Go home, Adelaide. I’m not in the mood,” Hella snaps, nearly ripping her sail in two when she unfurls it. The winds aren’t strong enough to fill it tonight, but Hella doesn’t care. She’ll float off into the distant storm for all she cares tonight.

That’s what they’re aiming for anyways, right? To go home?

She’s not sure anymore.

Adelaide sits a little straighter, whatever bullshit game she wanted to play at remaining at the dock as Hella sets out. She lets her stay, if only because physically hauling the Queen of Death off her boat is too much of a chore after the day she’s been through. And also possibly because Adelaide is actually behaving herself. She’s not even eating her grapes obnoxiously.

In fact, Adelaide stays incredibly quiet.

“What’s your problem!?” Hella asks, unnerved by Adelaide’s calm. Her eyes track Hella’s every movement, making her skin crawl.

“I’m not the one with the problem here, my little Queenslayer,” Adelaide responds.

Hella glares at her, fuming. Adelaide stands and Hella’s hands itch. She wishes she still had her sword, instead of being trapped inside of it. She wishes she had something she could use to smack Adelaide with - anything that could get Hella’s mind off the pain and confusion and anger that colors her vision red.

Adelaide draws closer. Hella clenches her fists, preparing just to punch her into next week-

-and Adelaide gently grabs her hand, unfurls her fingers, and deposits a handful of grapes directly into her palm. “You haven’t eaten all day, have you,” she says. It isn’t a question.

Her words remind Hella of the gnawing feeling in her stomach. At least it serves as a distraction from everything else. Still angry, she slams the grapes into her mouth and chews, stems and all. When she’s done, Adelaide stands in front of her again, this time with a quarter-loaf of bread in one hand and a block of cheese in the other.

“We liked to bake spices into our breads back in Nacre, but this will have to do,” Adelaide says with a sigh, tearing a piece of bread off the loaf. She breaks off a small block of cheese and hands them both to Hella.

So that’s where Hella finds herself, trying not to cry as the fallen Queen of Death restores her energy, piece by piece.

They don’t drink that night. Hella doesn’t drink Aubade’s version of moonshine, and Adelaide doesn’t drink the fermented fruit juice that seems to be an eternal fixture on her person.

They don’t talk much either, but the silence isn’t bad. It’s exactly what Hella needs.

 

*

 

Hella comes back to her boat the next afternoon to find Adelaide sitting on that same crate. Today there’s no ridiculous outfit, no jaunty hat or magic bottle of wine to keep her company.

Just Adelaide, in a plain blouse and pants that are a little too short for her, offering Hella something that could be mistaken for a smile.

They set out, Adelaide doing absolutely nothing to help (as usual), but instead of fraying Hella’s nerves, her presence is like a balm. Even in paradise, it feels like Hella’s life is spinning out of control. She’s fine, or as fine as someone like her could ever be.

That didn’t stop the sight of Adaire breaking wagons for the hell of it, desperate to return to the chaos of the life she once knew, from hurting.

Adelaide doesn’t ask her what happens, but Hella begins to explain regardless. Even in the closest place to paradise any of them will ever reach, she can’t find happiness. Not with the way her friends are falling apart. Even Adaire, who feels the need to try to ruin people’s lives because in her mind no one is allowed to be happy, has her own twisted version of a point.

Last she knew, the world outside, the place she calls home, was being torn asunder from every side. If it wasn’t Ordenna’s ceaseless marching, bootprints cleaving apart cultures the same way she cleaves apart wood, it was the Heat and the Dark, consuming everything worth living for.

And here they are, sailing on a fucking boat in a sea with unfamiliar tides under a blanket of stars that feel like lies. Every last one of them.

It’s the first time Hella ever bares her soul to Adelaide without the convenient excuse of being too drunk to keep her mouth shut. She feels her own vulnerability hanging in the air, waiting for Adelaide to laugh and tear it all down.

Hella’s mouth snaps shut with an audible click and she spins to look out at the water, focusing on the storm in the distance. With each day, it gets a little bit closer. A possible promise of home, if she still has a home to return to.

She keeps waiting for Adelaide to laugh, but it never comes. Instead, she hears Adelaide get to her feet somewhere behind her. Moments later, she joins Hella at the front of the boat, watching the very same storm.

“Do you remember the first time I joined you on this boat, Hella?” she asks.

“How could I forget,” Hella grumbles. “Why?”

“I’ve done some more thinking since then. Perhaps my kingdom was not as...” she pauses, flinching, as if it physically pains her to admit, “ _perfect_ as I had spent my life assuming it to be.”

Hella snorts. “You think?”

“This place is far nearer to perfection than I could have ever dreamed of. So why is it that so many of us find ourselves unhappy here?”

“I don’t know, because we suck? What’s your point?” Hella is not seeing her point - the only thing she’s starting to see is red. Leave it to Adelaide to listen to her pour her heart out about her deepest worries, only to turn the conversation into something entirely about herself. What a pompous, awful woman.

“We never chose to be here, Hella. Our bodies may be here, but the other things that make us who we are stay there,” she explains, gesturing to the storm in the distance. “The people here seem at peace because this is all they’ve ever known. The ones who once lived out there as well have had enough time to come to terms with this new land. You still have a job to do, Hella Varal, and it’s not to stack shelves in a store for the rest of your days.”

The anger melts from Hella’s body, replaced by a muted wonder that Adelaide Tristé IV, of all fucking people, has just made her feel better. Not angrier. Not even drunker! Just better.

Because as peaceful as it is to spend her days working with Adaire and her evenings out to sea, she is too battle-hardened to enjoy such a life of ease.

“What am I supposed to fight when my enemy is destruction itself?” she asks.

“Maybe you don’t fight,” Adelaide suggests. Hella gets ready to tell her off and accuse her of going back on what she said just moments before, but she continues speaking before Hella can fully gather her thoughts. “Maybe you protect instead.”

Adelaide produces an apple and a small knife out of nowhere. She splits it and hands half to Hella, who accepts it. They eat in a peaceful quiet, giving Hella the space to mull over Adelaide’s words and try to understand what she meant. It feels strange, to seriously consider a choice instead of acting on the first instinct that comes to her.

Yet it does not feel wrong, not entirely.

 

*

 

“You’re going _where_?” Adaire asks, disbelief dripping from every syllable even as she hands Hella two Dutartes.

Hella does not blush often, but she doesn’t have to look in a mirror to know how red her face currently is. “To Adelaide’s.”

“ _Why_?” Adaire gives her another Dutarte, even when the bill she slides to the other side of the counter is only for two. Employee discounts come in handy on occasion.

“I don’t know!” Hella admits, gesturing wildly and nearly throwing the food at the wall in the process. The only reason why it stays safe on the counter is thanks to Adaire’s quick reaction, swiping it back towards her before Hella can strike. “I just,” she cuts herself off with a groan as Adaire fiddles with the Dutartes.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with her lately,” Adaire says, eyeing Hella in a way that makes her want to yell. Like she thinks Hella’s full of shit.

“She just shows up on my boat! I don’t even invite her!”

“You spend a lot of time complaining about her, too.”

“You don’t know how obnoxious she can be.”

Adaire’s eyebrows keep climbing higher up on her face. “Which is why you’re going to her house to visit her. With food. Because she’s obnoxious.” Whatever Adaire is implying, Hella’s in no mood to hear it. She snatches the bag of goods away and throws out enough coins on the table to _probably_ cover the cost of everything. Even if it isn’t enough, Adaire can just subtract the difference from her next wages.

“Whatever. I’m going.”

Hella slams the door on her way out, cutting off Adaire’s shout wishing luck to some guy named Dave, or some comment she made about the day. Hella doesn’t care.

She doesn’t care so much that she stomps her entire way to Adelaide’s cottage. She’s built a large one on a cliffside overlooking the ocean. Nothing nearly as grand as her throne in Nacre, but Aubade has never had any need for a queen anyways.

But a powerful woman living by the sea is something it can readily accommodate.

When Hella reaches the door, made almost entirely of a cloudy glass that speaks to a type of architecture that can only be claimed to an empire of ghosts and memories, she debates about dropping the Dutartes right on her doorstep and leaving. Adelaide isn’t expecting her here. Hell, she doesn’t even know if Adelaide’s home right now.

“What am I even doing,” Hella mutters under her breath. She’s so occupied in her mental war that she doesn’t notice the shadowy figure appear on the other side of the glass. The door opens and Hella stands frozen in shock. Adelaide looks her over in a way not dissimilar to a cat eyeing a mouse it happened to find sleeping in its food dish.

Her gaze settles on the bag in Hella’s fist. “Is your new role to deliver goods directly to people’s homes, Hella? Because as much as I appreciate the thought, I didn’t order anything.”

Hella’s face is redder than it’s probably ever been. There’s a certain kind of courage it takes to stand on the battlefield and face the monsters she’s had to kill. A stalwart fearlessness beaten into every soldier and every mercenary that’s ever taken up a weapon.

There’s an entirely different kind of courage needed to stand on the doorstep of the most intimidating woman someone has ever met and offer her a couple of sweets. Hella finds herself in very short supply of the latter.

She draws upon whatever withered, exhausted reserves she has hiding deep within her. It’s just enough to force words out from between her teeth. “I’m not here for work.”

Adelaide’s eyebrow slowly begins to creep up, though its accompanied by a smirk that stretches her lips in two.

...Which then makes Hella think about her lips, and she tries to mentally stomp out those thoughts and discard them forever. She makes absolutely no progress trying to do so, but at least she’s aware enough to know what it means when Adelaide steps aside, dor wide open, and gestures at her to come in.

Adelaide leads her to a large table just past the entryway, something far too big and made of far too beautiful a wood to be used for only a single person. Ex-Queen or not, Hella quickly realizes that this place, with its ceilings that stretch on forever and furniture befitting a meeting hall, can dwarf even this tower of a woman.

Hella takes a seat at the massive table and takes the Dutartes out of the bag. She must have been too busy being mad at whatever nonsense Adaire was implying to notice how exactly she packed the food away. A blue box sits on the table, topped with a silver bow that easily comes undone with Adelaide’s gentle touch. Hella watches, strangely transfixed, as Adelaide lifts the top of the box off.

“I didn’t say those were for you,” Hella says.

“You wouldn’t have set them on my table if they weren’t,” Adelaide says, picking up a Dutarte to examine it more closely. “The presentation is beautiful. I didn’t think you to be a decorator, Hella.”

Hella grits her teeth and stomps down an emotion she refuses to put a name to. “I didn’t. It was Adaire.”

“How kind of her. May I have one?”

“I mean, you’re already touching it, so whatever.”

Adelaide smiles for just a moment, setting something off in Hella’s chest that she _also_ is resolutely determined not to examine. Hella takes a Dutarte for herself and pops it into her mouth, the slightly sour fruit serving as a nice contrast to the sweet filling. Adelaide takes the remaining pastry as well, though Hella finds herself not minding at all.

What she finds herself doing is watching Adelaide, her eyes glued to her every moment.

She shakes herself out of her stupor. What’s her problem?

Adelaide shoots Hella a look she absolutely refuses to interpret. Slowly, she stands up, slinking over to Hella like she’s a predator and Hella’s her prey. Hella pushes herself back into her chair, letting herself act on instinct. She braces herself for something - an attack, maybe.

She stops directly in front of Hella, leaning over until their faces are just inches apart. “Is something going on, Hella?” Her smirk fades, replaced by an emotion that Hella would never in her life think to associate with an interaction with Adelaide.

Worry? How is she worried?

Her look grows into something softer as Hella stays silent. “You are a strange one, Hella Varal.” The words escape her with such warmth, such fondness.

Hella is incredibly skilled at acting first and never stopping to ask questions. She doesn’t try to understand the tasks she’s entrusted or the movements she makes, instead choosing to trust the deepest parts of herself and the years of training that have molded her into who she is.

Maybe it’s that instinct that flares up here. She feels her body move slightly, just enough to close the distance between them and press her lips to Adelaide’s.

Kissing a queen, as she quickly discovers, is not much different than kissing any other kind of woman. Her lips are soft, though slightly chapped in the middle. She tastes like apples and sweet cream.

She kisses back in the way that only someone with untold amounts of practice can, sending electricity shooting throughout Hella’s body and setting every nerve alight. When Adelaide pulls back, her breath lingers against Hella’s lips.

Hella does not often try to understand things she cannot immediately explain, but the way Adelaide’s eyes softly flutter open makes everything fall into place.

“You’re always full of surprises, aren’t you?” Adelaide smirks.

“I guess I am,” Hella says. “But… that didn’t seem like a bad surprise.”

Adelaide’s smirk grows wider. “Not at all.”

This time, Adelaide is the one to lean forward. Hella meets her halfway.

 

*

 

The tides change: low, to high, to low again. Each wave brings the storm a little closer. Hella still goes out on her boat, though no matter how many days she spends with the taste of Aubade’s air on her tongue, it’ll never feel quite right. She still stacks boxes and sells trinkets for Adaire, while trying to distract her from cutting the straps off customers’ purses just to see their lives inconvenienced for a few minutes. She checks in on Hadrian twice a week, every week, trying her best to draw him into a conversation that can restore some amount of life to his empty eyes. She drags Lem out of the library and onto her boat, even if the fresh air does little to quell his ramblings on topics Hella has long since ceased trying to understand.

And on the days when Hella is not trying to keep her broken friends from being reduced to dust, Adelaide is there. She sits on that same crate, fruit in one hand and alcohol in the either. Adelaide gives her apples, pears, pomegranates, cherries that stain her fingers red and her lips redder. They drink less than they used to and talk about everything except for what they should call the way they seek each other out at night.

Adelaide visits Hella’s small home a few times, though as the tides change Hella finds herself spending more and more time at Adelaide’s. At first, only small things mark her presence: her toothbrush in the bathroom, a spare set of clothes tucked in-between two of Adelaide’s ridiculous outfits within her dresser.

Until Adelaide gets a bed big enough for two, and the nights when Hella finds her bed lonely grow few and far-between.

She’s still obnoxious, of course. There is not a world where Adelaide isn’t casually infuriating at least once a day. Despite that, or maybe even because of it, she forces her way into Hella’s life and claims her stake in her soul, just as she did on Hella’s fucking boat.

One night, after an incredibly long shift at Adaire’s store and an even longer evening spent failing to convince Hadrian to go outside, Hella has finally gotten to the comfortable drift between sleep and wakefulness.

Right before the scales are about to tip, letting Hella _finally_ fall asleep, Adelaide’s voice by her ear drags her back into the waking world. “Hella.”

“What, Adelaide. I was almost asleep!”

“I was thinking of the outside world. We’ll go back before the tides turn, you know.”

“And?” Hella asks.

“These nights will have to come to an end, Hella.”

Her words send an unpleasant chill down Hella’s back. Her fists instinctively tighten in the sheets. “Where are you going?”

“I’m not the one who will be going anywhere. You will.”

Anger flares up within Hella. She rolls over to fix Adelaide with a glare, but while she expects to see some kind of awful smirk or knowing glint in her eyes, all Hella can find is a somber acceptance. “Wait… what? What are you talking about?”

Adelaide sighs. “I was a queen. I ruled my land from a single throne. But you, Hella? You are a fighter, or at least you once were. What you still are is an adventurer. You live to keep moving, to keep seeing more and spreading whatever cause you’ve dedicated your sword to. As much as I would like it to, my bed cannot follow you everywhere.”

She has a point, as much as Hella hates to admit it. Though her words bring another concern to Hella’s mind, one that she prefers to keep locked away deep in the recesses of her mind. Maybe it’s the late hour, or the exhaustion dripping from every part of her, or maybe it’s the way Adelaide looks at her. Whatever it is, it’s enough to bring her to voice something she doesn’t like to bring to light. Admitting fear is admitting weakness, after all.

“You’re right, but... where am I supposed to go when I still don’t know what to fight for?”

Adelaide shifts closer to her, silently requesting to be wrapped in her arms. Hella gives in and draws her close.

“Maybe you fight for the ones you care for.”

Maybe.

 

*

 

The day before they leave Aubade, Hella takes her boat out on the water. She doesn’t go past the lagoon, not with the storm hovering so close to the waters she’s grown used to sailing.

Adelaide stands at her side, an apple in her hands and a proposition on her lips.

On that day, Hella Varal, the Wolf Killer, the Queenslayer, gains a new title: knight.

Hella has dealt in blood. She has sent spirits to their doom, time and time again.

Now, she will guide them to their reprieves.

She has already pledged her heart to Adelaide, in the darkness of night when the world seems to consist of only the two of them and nothing else. What else is it to commit her sword, her life, her reason to fight?

It is not a sacrifice. It is a gift.

 

*

 

Some time later, in a world of flight and falling moons, Fero Feritas continues not to understand anything.

“-And it’s fine now. We’re like, close. It’s fine,” Hella explains.

 _Close. So that’s what you call it,_ Adelaide echoes inside her mind with a laugh. Hella has to fight down a smile.

“Wait. Why are you close with the lady you killed that was _haunting you from a sword_ ,” Fero asks, giving Hella a look that very much conveys how full of bullshit he thinks she is.

“Well, we had the time to hang out!” Hella explains, as if that could come even close to describing the time she spent with Adelaide.

 _Hang out,_ Adelaide muses. _Is that what the kids are calling it these days?_

 _Shut up_ , Hella replies back, content to listen to the laughter in her mind even as Fero begins to pace and yell about ladies in swords and weird ghost bosses.

Maybe she doesn’t understand either, what exactly this thing between herself and Adelaide is. For as much thought as she's put into it, she's still just as confused as she was that first day she saw Adelaide on her boat. Maybe even before then, too.

But maybe some things don't need to be understood. They can just be.

  
  
  



End file.
